where did the books go?

I left design is dead on for quite a while, long enough that many of you might wonder if I myself was dead…in fact, i was in Ireland for most of the week and just got back. So, on a related note… just what has happened to books in architecture studios? For virtually all of modernist education, one or two key texts could always be found on students desks, from the modernist standards—Towards a New Architecture,  Space, Time and Architecture, The International Style—to the key texts of the 70s and the early 80s—Five Architects and Complexity and Contradiction—into 1990s—Supermodernism*, S, M, L, XL, and perhaps Move and Animate Form. But what’s on student desks today? I’ve asked students and faculty around Columbia and in other schools as well. Nobody has thus far identified any texts that could act as a common basis of knowledge in the studio. Why is this? What does it mean? Is there any relation to my gloomy prognosis for design

*I’m hoping to have a surprise dialogue about Supermodernism on these pages soon.

 

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